@ Mashed 2008: Fire Eagle one year on

Fire Eagle is a great example of the kind of service that can power great hacks. It launched at Hack Day last year, and Ben Ward is back this year to explain how the project has developed.

In short, you tell Fire Eagle where you are and other services can use Fire Eagle to build location-relevant services around that data.

Ward showed Wikinear as an example of the kind of service that could use Fire Eagle. Wikinear shows Wikipedia articles according to your location, and therefore the relevance of those articles.

There's a swathe of applications all using Fire Eagle now:

• Firebot updates Twitter with your location.• Yahoo's Zonetag is a photo uploader for Flickr which geo-tags photos.• Plazes, a location-based social network.• Travel site Dopplr.

Fire Eagle have also introduced a couple of dashboard widgets, including one that shows relevant weather to your location, plus work with Facebook and Open Social is on the cards. Ward said that Tom Coates, one of Fire Eagle's founders, is determined to rig up what he calls "an ambient orb" system, so that a line of ten orbs will glow hot or cold depending how near each member of the team is to the Brickhouse office. Not so far away from the preoccupation with Na Baz Tag bunnies at last year's Hack day; if you can write proximity-based applications you could get the bunny to ask your flatmate to make you a cuppa just before you get home.

PacManhattan could have benefitted from Fire Eagle, said Ward; all those players in New York's streets dressed as ghosts or Pacmen could have used location-based mobile services.

Ward has also been playing with Last.fm. Mapping people's locations with their music profiles mens you can create music maps of the country, so who listens to what where. What's the most popular band in Glasgow? And does anyone in Bristol like Massive Attack anymore?

"Most importantly, it allows users to control their location data so they can share it in a safe and reassuring way. Location is incredibly sensitive so we deal with it in an incredibly sensitive way."

The current beta version is invite only, but Fire Eagle will launch later this summer.